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About LinkBacksRead more.Price cuts come in the wake of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards.
Read more.Price cuts come in the wake of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards.
Too little too late really. These cards will cost you quite a bit extra in energy bills over their lifetimes compared to the new Nvidia equivalents. This is coming from a person whose last two GPUs have been AMD. I really think they've lost their way, haven't had an impressive, genuinely new card since the 7970...that was 2 and half years ago which is a long time in technology terms.
I have a Powercolor PCS+OC R9 290 with a 2nd on order tbh the 980 and 970 does not impress me and my R9 290 outperforms both 970 and 980 at stock clocks while remaining cooler and still costs less(£300 compared to the 980's £430+)Nvidia will have to do a lot better both cost and performance to make me even consider their cards.
No they won't...the difference is less than a few quid a year and that is only if you have them running at nearly full load, which nobody other than bitcoin miners actually do.Originally Posted by Nobull
Yeah but £250 for a quieter, more efficient 970 which can easily overclock to be faster than even a 290X, never mind a 290 makes that £300 seem pretty expensive to me.
You reckon it's that low? Maybe you're right.
AMD are offering the Never Settle Space bundle with their cards, which is worth about £60, assuming you would've bought the games anyway...
Just to put some numbers to the discussion.You reckon it's that low? Maybe you're right.
My electricity costs approx 17 pence per kilowathour. A 290X with a TDP of 250W (I think) would cost me 4.25 pence per hour of use. I game approx 8 hours a week, which over the course of a year would cost £17.68. Say you replace your card every 4 years, that's £70.72 total cost of electricity.
Now, the 980 has a TDP of 165W. Using the same figures that's, 2.8pence an hour, 22.44pence per week, £11.66 per year and £46.67 over the lifetime of the card. Only a difference of £24 over the lifetime of the cards. Obviously though that's a max TDP which is often never the case. One thing to note tho is that difference increases for crossfire/SLI users and people who game alot more than me, but for fairly casual users, it amounts to only a few quid a year as Bagpuss said.
Good to see somebody running the numbers. I agree that most people buying this level of hardware will be gaming quite a bit more than eight hours a week. Remember also that the hardware is far from 100% efficient so more power is drawn at the wall than what is actually supplied to the card (the rest lost mainly as heat).
Both 290 and 290X will need to come down in price a lot lower than that. Even forgetting the energy efficiency, the GTX900s are clearly superior in performance.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/N...TX_980/26.html
AMD have the inferior product so need to charge less in order to compete.
How so? Most people buying this level of hardware will be in full employment, and of the age where they are likely to have family of some sort. 8 hours a week would seem pretty typical.
PSUs are around 88-90% efficient in most cases, but remember TDP isn't anything like the actual power draw, so Ollyl's figures are overestimated.Remember also that the hardware is far from 100% efficient so more power is drawn at the wall than what is actually supplied to the card (the rest lost mainly as heat).
That is true however. Assuming you can get hold of a 970/980 then you should expect to pay a slight premium for them, just you did for the 290/290X over the nVidia cards they beat.AMD have the inferior product so need to charge less in order to compete.
...They are coming down in price. That's the point of this article. Current store prices are yet to reflect the price cut but you can get a r9 290 for £215 right now. See it's roughly 25% cut it could go down to £160, but probably more like £170. The current cheapest GTX970 is £250. That's a potential difference of £80, nearly half of the price of a r9 290. Let's looks at the graphs you have provided.
At 1080p:
r9 290 is 77% the performance of a GTX 980
GTX 970 is 88% the performance of a GTX 980
You could potentially pay 50% more for an 11% gain in performance. And that's a best case scenario, at higher resolutions the relative performance difference decreases.
The above current prices are taken from Scan but there is a lot of ifs and buts (and possible some dodgy maths!), you also have to considered other things such as noise and running costs. And if you can supply enough cool air to the r9 290, but what I'm trying to say is AMD do recognise a new generation of cards has come out. It's pretty standard fair for company to cut there old gen of cards when the competition brings new ones out, the competition will do the same when the company brings a new generation of cards out.
It could be interesting to see how much of the AMD price drops get transferred to the consumer...
Kalniel - neither of us have stats to back this up so it's a stupid point to argue. Plenty of kids with rich parents and even many of those in full-time employment are likely to spend more than 1.1 hours per day gaming if they're buying this kind of hardware (and even if they're not). Re efficiency, that varies hugely by load and which PSU you're buying. Looks like you're cherry-picking best-case efficiency numbers there.
Lot of guesswork there Jowsey. I'll be absolutely amazed to see 290s at £160. But if that does happen then I'd absolutely consider that to be incredible value. I'm going by current pricing though and with the inferior 290X costing more than the GTX970 despite being slightly slower, much louder and more power hungry.
Re draw from walls: 88%-90% is roughly 80 Plus Gold award. I'd imagine if you are buying a flagship grade GPU, you have spent some money on your PSU. Efficient power supplies are no longer super premium, thankfully.
I'm disregarding the rich kids comment as they aren't bothered about pricing of things, which is what we are discussing. I however agree there will be people who game more than 9 hours a week, I don't really game through the week as when I get home from work I just want food and some tv show. I do maybe 10 hours across a weekend if I have no other plans though. I do wonder what would be a true average though, we should do a pole, FOR SCIENCE !
Re cherry picking numbers, you did just the same assume a worst case scenario, you also did that when you highlighted £160 for a 290 when I was discussing £170.
I do hope we get a good slice of r9 290 pie but I am inclined to be pessimistic about it with you. What we didn't discuss is the fact that if this goes down to roughly this price it's going to be undercutting the newly unleashed 285 (@~ £175). Which means 1 of 2 things will happen.
1 - the R9 285 will drop in price to £160 or lower.
2 - the R9 290 won't drop below £190 to preserve a little bit of room for exoticly cooled 285's
Lets wait and see!
These are competitively feature rich components. Eventhough price cuts make them more palatable, you cannot just go for the cheaper pick, or you would have potentially lost the top preferential feature for you.
290x isn't slower than 970 - check frametime lapse comparisons at PCPer - not at all slower than 980 either; it is just a matter of which vendor's exclusively featured game it is, your deduction is based on. Power consumption is definitely 100 watts higher; however it isn't 290x that rakes electricity in spikes like the 980 does.
Last edited by mtcn77; 07-10-2014 at 02:44 PM.
I think you misunderstood me there - I'd never suggest just buying whatever is cheapest (unless it's for a non-gamer I suppose). I'll admit I pay very little attention to frame time stuff (it may be lazy but frames / second is just a much simpler way to boil down performance and it throws out fewer unexpected / incongruent results).
And I do know that many games favour AMD or nVIDIA over the other, but Techpowerup uses a huge range of games and boils it all down to a page of averages, which I think is much more useful. Few people would choose which games they'll play based on whether it delivers better results on their brand of GPU. I managed to play Crysis 1 (which I believe was better on AMD) with a GeForce, Crysis 2 (nVIDIA-friendly) on a Radeon and then Crysis 3 (AMD-friendly again) on a GeForce (damnit) but they ran great regardless and I had a lot of fun with them.
But isn't 42 or so (the average age of a PC gamer) a bit old to be relying on hand outs from parents? Throw in stats about proportion of 42 yr olds who are living alone rather than with some kind of family and you can back up my claim with more than just guesswork.
Best case would be over 90%. 88% is a good minimum for anyone who has sensibly chosen a PSU. Either way, the loss is dwarved by the fact real power draw is much lower than the quoted TDP.Re efficiency, that varies hugely by load and which PSU you're buying. Looks like you're cherry-picking best-case efficiency numbers there.
So you're just ignoring the news articleI'm going by current pricing though
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